Dr. Martini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences. She studies the physiochemical and functional properties of food constituents and their relationship with sensory perception. By expanding our knowledge of how lipds crystallize under different conditions and learning to control crystallization, our laboratory works to improve sensory attributes of fats and emulsions and applies this to developing new food science technology that will lead to healthier food products for consumers.

Dr. Ilka Nemere is a Professor of Nutrition Science and Director of the Nutrition Science Program. Her duties include conducting research for publication in peer-reviewed journals, submitting grant propposals, training graduate and undergraduate researchers, reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals, serving on committees, teaching Endocrine Aspects of Nutrition Science, Molecular Methods in Nutrition Science, and Graduate Seminar.

Amy Odum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her research interests are in basic behavioral phenomena, such as response persistence, sensitivity to delayed outcomes, conditional discriminations, and environmental influences on drug effects. Her work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Odum completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont’s Human Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory after earning her Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology, specializing in Behavior Analysis, from West Virginia University. She received a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida. Her teaching interests include basic behavior analysis and behavioral pharmacology. Dr. Odum has served on the board of editors of a number of journals and is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

Kerstin Schroder is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research interests focus on the effects of dieting and nutrition interventions among overweight and obese adults. Further, she is interested in the sensory, psychological, social, and environmental factors affecting dieting behavior. Additional research interests include the self-management of health behaviors among chronic disease populations (e.g., HIV/AIDS, coronary heart disease), and methodological approaches towards the measurement of health-related behaviors and health outcomes.

As a clinical neurospychologist, my research interests involve the study of severe cognitive deficits in the elderly. For the past twelve years, my colleagues and I have examined genetic and environmental factors that appear to influence the risk of developing severe cognitive impairments such as dementia of the Alzheimer's type. In a project funded by the National Institute on Aging, we have conducted interviews, cognitive testing, and clinical evaluations in a population of over 5,000 seniors residing in Cache County, Utah. This project has been ongoing since 1995 and has involved four county-wide screens for dementia, in addition to collecting longitudinal data on cognition, occupational history, and health and psychiatric information. Our research team has studied diverse topics of aging such as the cognitive correlates of late-life depression, the influence of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease on memory and other cognitive abilities, the role of various medications in reducing the risk for Alzheimer's disease, neuroimaging correlates of cognitive impairment, behavioral disturbances in dementia, and the influence of family history of Alzheimer's disease and other genetic factors on an individual's cognitive performance.

Dr. Robert Ward is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Sciences. His research interests include potential beneficial bioactivities of the milk fat globular membrane, effects of diet on systemic lipid metabolism (including meat and milk), and small molecule metabolomics. The Ward lab is equipped with a GC-MS and GC-FID, and research activities primarily focus on measuring fatty acid from all lipid classes as well as small molecules from various biological and food matrices.

Heidi Wengreen, RD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition at Utah State University. She completed her PhD in Nutrition and Food Sciences with an emphasis in nutritional epidemiology from USU in 2002 and joined the faculty there in 2003.

Dr. Wengreen’s research interests include examining associations between nutrition and health and disease across the lifespan. Dr. Wengreen has examined associations between protein intake and hip fracture and dietary patterns and cognitive decline and dementia among aging populations in Utah. She is a co-investigator of the Cache County Study on Memory, Health and Aging, a large prospective study of genetic and environmental factors associated with risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias. In addition, Dr. Wengreen has received funding from the Department of Education to improve the nutritional education and environment for children attending school in the Cache County School District. She has collaborated on the development of the Viva Vegetables! curriculum, a sensory-based food-focused curriculum used in the Cache County School district to teach children about the benefits of eating vegetables through hands on learning experiences.

Dr. Wengreen is a member of the American Dietetic Association, the Society for Epidemiologic Research and the American Society of Nutrition. She has authored 7 peer-reviewed publications in the area of diet and disease.